Down Home with Bob Seger

Ramblin' Gamblin' Man (1969) was Bob Seger's full-length declaration of intent, a fine example of the grainy, near-primitivist punk thrash that only a town like Detroit could deliver. This album got constant play when I lived in Detroit and probably got even more after I moved to the comparatively Edenic San Diego. The contrast between the two places wasn't lost on me. Detroit had a certain industrial-grade musical aggression, a willingness to get down and dirty without worrying too much about finesse, while San Diego seemed almost absurdly relaxed by comparison. Seger's record carried some of that Detroit weather with it, a reminder of a place where rock and roll could still sound like a physical confrontation.

This is an earnest and brilliant example of garage-band genius, the kind of thrashing primitivism produced by musicians who were definitely not virtuosos but who nonetheless managed to howl, jam, and slam all the pent-up teenage rage of their Michigan fan base into a minimalist fury. There's very little here that could be mistaken for sophistication, and that's precisely the point. The playing is frequently ragged, the arrangements occasionally lumbering, and the production has a wonderfully unvarnished quality. The band sounds less interested in getting everything right than in making sure nobody walks away unscathed. There's a certain democratic quality to this kind of rock and roll: you don't need to be a great musician to participate, but you had better be prepared to throw yourself into it."Black Eyed Girl" is a gloriously lumbering blues number, with prime Seger shouting, screaming, and bellowing, his rasp climbing toward an appealingly frayed high note. He sounds like a man who has no intention of saving his voice for the next performance. "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" is a hard-charging rocker built around a simple, killer drumbeat, with all sorts of weird psychedelia, feedback, wah-wah pedal orgies, and Seger rasping his lungs out over the commotion. The song has a wonderfully reckless quality, as if the band has stumbled onto something exciting and has no intention of stopping to figure out exactly what it is. The instrumental flourishes don't so much decorate the music as contribute to its general state of agitation. Everything is in motion, everything is turned up, and subtlety has been left somewhere outside the studio.

"Down Home" is another barn burner, a great companion piece to the Stones' domestic-life portraits, particularly "Live with Me." There's a similar fascination with the less respectable side of everyday existence, the pleasures, irritations, and disreputable characters that make up a life lived without much concern for appearances. Seger had a knack for finding musical and emotional mileage in these ordinary, sometimes unlovely circumstances. He wasn't trying to make the lives of his characters more attractive than they were. There was something recognizable and occasionally uncomfortably familiar about them.

Seger would refine his approach considerably over the years, with mostly good and occasionally great results. He became a more polished songwriter and performer, and eventually found a way to bring his particular brand of Midwestern rock and roll to a much larger audience. But something was lost along the way, or at least pushed into the background. On Ramblin' Gamblin' Man, the music still has the feel of something being worked out in real time, with the rough edges and occasional excesses contributing to rather than detracting from the experience. It isn't a record that asks you to admire the musicianship or contemplate the finer points of arrangement. It wants to grab you by the collar, drag you onto the dance floor, and leave you wondering what the hell just happened. This album gave me the idea that hard rock, at ground level, should sock you in the jaw and kick you in the head. I still think that's a pretty good idea.

Kudos for Phil Lesh

 The Grateful Dead remain a problematic band for historians who like to place artists in strict genres and loath those who breach the boundaries. The band had equal footing in all things Americana--old time rock, blues, old school rhythm and blues, folk, country, bluegrass-- with the rest of their music easily moving into areas that are modal, jazzy, influenced not a little by Eastern forms of improvisation, and not a little avant gard . It seemed at times that they flirted with the edges of progressive rock, and it seemed as if they weren't conciously trying to emulate their virtuoso European cousins. Not to say that the majority of this limitless and often exhilarating eclecticism comes from Lesh, but the late bass player's already broad musical training and playing experience--theory, composing, playing trumpet in jazz band situations--certainl

y informs the off-center improvisations his foundation for the Dead. Part of the Dead's musical genius was how they anticipated what the others were going to do in the moment of extemporaneous music making--we generally think of Bob Weir's uncanny skill to be precisely where he needed to be during Garcia's roaming guitar leads. But here we have an isolated and extended example of Lesh's particular genius as a bassist. As has been said in the NY Times obituary, his lines often became lead parts in themselves, offering sublime counterpoint and alternative melodic compliments to Garcia's decorative riffing , as well as working in perfect sympathy, simpatico, with the dynamic drum work. Lesh had a jazz player's instincts.

Hopefully cautious

  

It was a wonderful, joyous, and hopeful experience viewing the election map this morning after. I watched the election for a solid four hours last night, switching between the various news channels, and as they called one seat after another for the Democrats and the amount of blue increased on the various election maps on the channels, it became obvious that America wanted America to be America again, to paraphrase the Langston Hughes poem. We have been a great nation that has done great things for the benefit of its people and for the world . I'm not blind to our part in the worst situations both domestically and internationally, but it seems to me that we've righted ourselves and got on the beam again, willing, and able to do the right thing. But Trump was a horror both in his first term and a worse debacle in his second; he is what happens if you let a cut-rate banana republic strongman take charge of the power being President brings you. God willing and the creek don't rise, the Democrat will take on the long task of setting things right and bringing Trump and his sycophants to an accounting for their sins against the nation. Remember that their wasn't much ticket splitting in the various results: voters rejected Republican slates throughout the night and put Democrats in their place, in the House, the Senate, and in the Governor's offices. I hope this shows the national change of mood and that our better angels can now guide us to a new time of justice, peace and good deeds in general. But has been said, there is much work to be done. But I am hopeful, for a change, and that's not nothing.

notes on Jack Spicer's Expressive Diffusion

 

(This is a rewrite of three different pieces on Spicer. Read him.-tb)

Ron Silliman commemorated the anniversary of September 11 on his blog with a gruesome photograph of Ground Zero, over which he superimposed two poems by Jack Spicer. The collage understandably provoked a minor tempest among readers who felt that we had endured enough fetishism of the attacks, and that Spicer himself might not have approved of such a use of his work. I found the combination both compelling and appropriate. Spicer equated God with a kind of Big Radio, imagining poetic inspiration as a series of transmissions from distant places, carrying the voices of dead poets whose metaphors might, in turn, become apt descriptions of contemporary circumstances.

The question raised by Silliman’s collage is whether a poem belongs to its author’s original intentions or to the historical circumstances in which subsequent readers encounter it. By the time the hidden essence or secret nuance of a poem catches up with a culture’s experience, the poet’s original intent, while interesting, is no longer necessarily decisive. What matters is how the words make our lives comprehensible, even if only on a visceral level. One could argue that the suggestive correspondences between older poems and contemporary events amount to little more than coincidental irony. Yet there comes a saturation point at which lines originally intended to suggest something hushed, elusive, and only vaguely graspable become precisely the phrases we need to articulate what otherwise escapes us. Tragedies and unexpected windfalls alike can intervene in our lives, leaving us searching for language adequate to the experience. Sometimes a poem written for an entirely different occasion supplies the words we cannot find for ourselves.

The poet eventually loses control of what his work is supposed to mean as history adds new associations to its syntactical skin. Spicer, I suspect, might well have objected to the use of his poems in Silliman’s collage. Nevertheless, there is a savage bluntness in the ways poets attempt to extract greater resonance from the obscenity of violence, and that bluntness speaks powerfully to what we remember on September 11. What Spicer intended becomes, in this instance, a secondary concern. Today was the day everything changed, as the overused phrase goes, and the event forced people to examine who they were, who they claimed to be, and why those distinctions mattered in the face of such incomprehensible destruction. Spicer, no less than anyone else, would likely have considered the implications at length. There is something compelling about the notion that words spoken in one context can be repeated against seemingly opposing backgrounds, acquiring meanings their speakers could never have anticipated. The voices transmitted through the air, through the radio of memory, are activated by extraordinary events that transform our ordinary lives, which are never as static as we might imagine. Silliman’s collage is an inspired combination of histories, demonstrating that the past and the present are no longer mutually exclusive.

This capacity for unexpected resonance is one of the reasons Jack Spicer deserves a more prominent place in the American poetic canon. I am just finishing what may be the must-read poetry volume of the year, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian and published by Wesleyan University Press. The collection has temporarily overcome my prejudice against poems about poetry and poets. Spicer’s third-rail wit, his willingness to interrogate the premises of his own art, has a way of knocking the reader off balance.

A singular figure who fit comfortably neither among the Beats nor in the New York School or the San Francisco Renaissance, Spicer wrote at the margins of the principal debates about what poetry was and ought to be. Yet his counterarguments, asides, and declarations often possess a self-contained clarity and vision that surpass those of many writers whose work he regarded with suspicion. He was an outsider even within the literary communities in which he moved, and his poems reflect a persistent distrust of the conventions through which poets establish their reputations and defend their artistic territory.

Interrogating received notions was Spicer’s abiding concern. The practice of making literary practice the unifying metaphor for an entire body of work can seal poetry off from the very readership that might benefit from its skewed perspective. Unlocking a door only to discover another locked door, or a brick wall, ceases to be amusing when one begins reading poems for something other than the status they confer upon their authors. Spicer, however, positions poetry and the profession surrounding it among the many activities through which individuals attempt to make their daily lives cohere around some faint sense of purpose.

Whether writing about money, sexuality, religion, or poetry itself, Spicer returns to the tidy arrangements by which language organizes our most unruly ideas. He distrusts the easy adjectives, similes, and conclusions that allow us to move through the hours without confronting the inadequacy of our explanations. Language makes the world manageable, but it can also obscure the very things it claims to reveal. The poet's task, in Spicer's view, is not simply to manufacture elegant descriptions but to remain alert to the distance between the world and the words we use to describe it.

His poem “Thing Language” offers a particularly concise expression of this suspicion:

Thing Language

By Jack Spicer

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises

Tougher than anything.

No one listens to poetry. The ocean

Does not mean to be listened to. A drop

Or crash of water. It means

Nothing.

It

Is bread and butter

Pepper and salt. The death

That young men hope for. Aimlessly

It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No

One listens to poetry.

The ocean here resists the elaborate meanings poets would impose upon it. It is neither a convenient symbol nor a willing participant in the human search for significance. It simply exists, indifferent to the interpretive machinery brought to bear upon it. The poem’s repetitions and abrupt turns seem to mock the assumption that language can secure a final understanding of the world. Even as Spicer describes the ocean, he insists upon its refusal to be described adequately. The result is a paradox: poetry declares its own inadequacy while demonstrating how much can be communicated through that very admission.

There is a reserved antagonism running through Spicer’s work, a subtle and ironic derision of the language arts as he saw them practiced. He recognized how easily poetry could become entangled in matters of status, property, and the ownership of ideas, as writers mistook their own cleverness for genius and their reputations for evidence of genuine achievement. The external world, which we can never know except through descriptions that themselves require continual revision, remains something else altogether. Nature and reality have no need for the elaborate vocabularies with which poets compare them to everything else they encounter.

What does this prove? Perhaps, as Spicer suggests, that we know far less about the material we attempt to distill into verse than we would like to believe. Even our language is borrowed, divided among other speakers and other conversations. The poet does not possess words so much as receive and rearrange them, hoping to discover combinations that reveal something not previously available to consciousness.

This brings us to Spicer’s most distinctive conception of the poet as a radio. In his poetics, inspiration is less an expression of individual genius than a form of dictation. The poet becomes a living instrument capable of intercepting transmissions from an otherwise invisible world of sharper, bolder, more original combinations of sound, rhythm, and form. The artist is an antenna, not necessarily the originator of the message. The task is to receive it accurately, even when the transmission is obscure or unwelcome.

Spicer’s poem “The Sporting Life” develops this idea through a deliberately bruising analogy:

The Sporting Life

By Jack Spicer

The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios

don't develop scar-tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a

transistor, which most souls are, the battery or diagram

burns out replacable or not replacable, but not like that

punchdrunk fighter in a bar. The poet

Takes too many messages. The right to the ear that floored him

in New Jersey. The right to say that he stood six rounds with

a champion.

Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if the

scar tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where the

invisible champions might not have hit him. Too many of

them.

The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a

counterpunching radio.

And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even

know they are champions.

The metaphor of the radio becomes more complicated here. The poet is not simply a passive receiver of beautiful transmissions from beyond the self. He is also a damaged combatant, someone who has taken too many blows and accumulated too much scar tissue. Messages arrive with a physical and psychological cost. The poet may become unreliable, even a liar, as he attempts to account for what he has received. Yet he continues to counterpunch, responding to forces he cannot fully understand or control.

The poem also complicates the idea of divine inspiration. The messages may be powerful, but they are not necessarily aware of their own power. Their significance does not depend upon their recognition of it, any more than a champion needs to know who has been defeated by his blows. Spicer's radio is thus both a vehicle for inspiration and an emblem of the poet's vulnerability. The poet receives what he cannot claim to have created, and he must somehow transform it into language without pretending to possess its ultimate meaning.

Spicer was an unusual and often troubled figure: an alcoholic, a contrarian, and a man frequently at odds with the literary community in which he lived. Yet he was also a serious, sometimes brilliant poet whose work offered propositions rather than easy conclusions, whose questions were thornier and less comforting than the sweetened verse celebrated by literary fashion. His poems repeatedly challenge us to reconsider the relationship between language and experience, between the individual voice and the forces that speak through it.

In this respect, I would place him alongside Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, both of whom subjected the elaborate infrastructure of our descriptions to relentless scrutiny. Like Stevens, Spicer was interested in the ways imagination constructs a version of reality that can sustain us without ever entirely containing the world. Like Williams, he understood that the particularities of ordinary life could resist the abstractions through which poetry seeks to organize them. And in his lyric brilliance, his ear for conversational turns and sudden reversals, he can be compared with Frank O’Hara, a poet he famously disliked, and who seems to have returned the sentiment.

Spicer's distinctiveness lies in the way he makes the contradictions, competing desires, and unexpected conundrums of verbal experience comprehensible to the senses. His poems are often funny, abrasive, and resistant to the consolations of conventional lyricism. They reward close attention because they do not resolve their tensions prematurely. Instead, they allow a thought to develop until its own complications become the subject of the poem.

“Book of Music” provides a striking example of this method. Where many poems about love attempt to preserve its intensity by transforming it into an image of eternity, Spicer approaches the subject with a skepticism that gradually dismantles the romantic metaphor.

Book of Music

By Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, the lovers

Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where

Did it end? There is no telling. No love is

Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries

From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye

Like death.

Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length

Of coiled rope

Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths

Its endings.

But, you will say, we loved

And some parts of us loved

And the rest of us will remain

Two persons. Yes,

Poetry ends like a rope.

The opening image suggests the exhaustion that follows an immense emotional undertaking. The lovers resemble swimmers emerging from an ocean, their experience so encompassing that it becomes difficult to locate the point at which it ended. Yet Spicer immediately begins dismantling the comparison. Love is not an ocean whose waves blur the boundaries between beginning and end, nor is its conclusion necessarily a deathlike disappearance. It is, instead, like a length of coiled rope, whose twists cannot conceal the fact that it has two ends.

The shift is devastating in its simplicity. The circle of romantic fulfillment gives way to an object with a finite length, an object that may be knotted, twisted, and coiled but cannot escape its termination. The lovers may insist that they loved, and Spicer grants that some parts of them did. But the rest of them remain two separate people, each with an existence beyond the relationship. The final assertion, “Poetry ends like a rope,” extends the argument beyond love itself. Neither emotion nor art can claim exemption from the limits that govern ordinary things.

This is a cynic's view, perhaps, but not an entirely unfeeling one. Spicer understands the appeal of the original romantic image, the dizzying promise of a love that seems as boundless as the world itself. His refusal to preserve that illusion is not merely an exercise in disenchantment. It is a way of acknowledging the distance between what we feel and what we can honestly say about it. The twists and turns of experience do not necessarily restore what has been lost. Rapture gives way to memory, and memory may eventually soften into the skepticism of someone fortunate enough to witness his own foolish expectations about people, places, and things—including the earnest declarations he once made about poetry in classrooms, dorm rooms, and cafés where the intelligent and underpaid gathered for a cheap drink and some company.

The same skepticism that informs Spicer’s treatment of love animates his understanding of poetry. Both are human endeavors through which we attempt to impose coherence on experiences that resist it. Both invite us to believe in meanings that may prove temporary, and both leave us confronting the limits of our own descriptions. Yet Spicer's skepticism does not make his work nihilistic. On the contrary, it creates the conditions for a more alert and demanding engagement with language. If words cannot guarantee the truths we want them to express, they may still reveal unexpected connections, expose our evasions, and give shape to experiences that would otherwise remain inarticulate.

This is what makes Spicer's work so compelling, and why Silliman's September 11 collage seems to me more than a provocative juxtaposition. The collage demonstrates that a poem does not remain sealed within the circumstances of its composition. Once released into the world, it becomes available to histories and experiences that its author could neither anticipate nor control. The words may return to us through the radio of memory, carrying messages that seem newly urgent because the world has changed around them.

Spicer might have resisted such an interpretation. Indeed, his suspicion of poetic ownership and his insistence on the autonomy of language might have led him to object to the very idea that his work could be recruited to explain a historical catastrophe. But that possibility does not invalidate the collage. It underscores the paradox at the heart of his poetics: the poet transmits messages without owning them, and the words acquire meanings beyond the poet's authority.

No one wrote quite like Jack Spicer. His poetry remains a singular achievement because it exposes the instability of language while demonstrating its extraordinary capacity for resonance. Peter Gizzi, Kevin Killian, and Wesleyan University Press deserve our gratitude for restoring this major American voice to the shared canon. My Vocabulary Did This to Me makes clear that Spicer's work is not merely a set of arguments about poetry, nor a collection of historical curiosities from an eccentric literary outsider. It is a sustained inquiry into how words reach us, how they fail us, and how they sometimes become indispensable precisely when our own experience has left us speechless.

The poet is a radio, a liar, a counterpunching radio. The world sends its signals, often without explanation, and history supplies the circumstances in which we finally hear them. What matters is not whether the poet intended every subsequent meaning, but whether the words continue to make contact with the lives we are trying to understand. Spicer's poems do. They arrive from elsewhere, bearing the marks of their own contradictions, and remind us that language, like love, like history, and like the coiled rope, is always moving toward an end even as it opens onto meanings we cannot yet foresee.

Enough with the "end of reading" riff

Slate's sharp-witted book reviewer Laura Miller has read scads of articles and books declaring that "reading is dead" and she declares that she's had enough. The digital age has posed a threat to reading habits and changed the commerece of the book selling trade for good and ill, lets admit, but Miller wearies of the sad panic over the alleged end of literacy in our lifetime. Knock it off, she says , find another idea. It is perilous to declare any particular activity “dead,” given our previous attempts to wish away theater, painting, poetry, broadcast television, and even movies. They have been declared dead, individually and collectively, at various times over the decades, yet somehow they always rise from the coroner’s table and continue to thrive. Jazz is dead; vinyl records are dead; CDs are dead. People rely on statistics, polls, and other dubious databases to construct grand theories about why things supposedly become moribund, but other indicators contradict the claim that reading has ceased to be a social activity. 

Print book sales total around 707 million units, well above pre-pandemic 2019 levels, and represent roughly three-quarters of all book sales. Bookstores were also placed on the endangered-species list by futurists and were supposed to vanish. Yet, according to the AP, American Booksellers Association (ABA) membership has nearly tripled over the decade, reaching more than 3,400 members across over 3,700 locations—the highest level since the late 1990s. Independent bookstores remain under pressure, and margins are razor-thin, but there is obvious consumer demand. Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated—a kind of make-believe in their own right.

There is a definite social movement among people who want to read entire books, as the rate at which new bookstores are opening has remained steady for quite some time. What readers are buying—self-help, romance, sci-fi, mystery, popular psychology, or celebrity biographies—is not especially relevant; attracting and retaining customers requires a broad, well-curated selection of categories. Margins are thin, but the bookstores that open are staying open. Sales at my bookstore are generally good—sometimes very brisk, at other times slower—but we remain a going concern. Those who purchase the books we specialize in—literature, science, history, philosophy, theater, poetry, music, and art—are indeed reading the many fine volumes they take home. The "reading is dead" trope is dead itself. It should be buried and remain that way, entombed.

NOWHERE, NO WAY, NO HOW

"Nowhere Man" from the Beatles Rubber Soul album, their 6th album and released in 1965, was a low point in that seminal album. Principal writer John Lennon was offering a kind of confession that he'd been a man of many plans but little action, but his strategy to shift the point of  view from confessor to observer is, it seems, catastrophic. I always thought this was one of the weakest things the Beatles ever recorded, seeming to be an obvious effort to write a “message song” in the wake of all the protest music that came before it. The genius of Beatles lyrics was that Lennon and McCartney avoided trying to say “heavy things” deliberately. Both were familiar with contemporary poetry at the time, and it’s my guess that the influence, if any, came from Eliot and Williams, where the messages being delivered, if any, relied on mood, tone, word choice, and the telling detail. "Nowhere Man” eschews all that and puts it out there so the hippies and fellow trend-chasers wouldn’t miss it: “He’s a real nowhere man / Sitting in his nowhere land / Making all his nowhere plans for nobody...” The song has been favorably compared with Eliot’s thematically similar poem “The Hollow Men,” but a side-by-side overview of the song and poem gives Eliot the edge because the poet has the freedom to elaborate on the page the diagnosis he’s chosen to write about. That’s to say, Eliot is frankly better at writing a piece about the shallowness of material pursuits. The advantage of Eliot is that his poem is in the first person and has a confessional quality. It seems like a collection of private thoughts entertained amid the hustle of modern life, with the poem’s narrator ruing the choices he made and the obligations they created for him. The Beatles’ stanzas are judgmental and present us with a verdict, a quality that has always annoyed me, ever since I bought the album decades ago. In shorter form, I think Eliot’s final lines from his poem summarize what’s wrong with “Nowhere Man”: “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Far Out magazine, a UK-based online platform, bills itself as an independent voice amid the ever-churning wars inspired by pop musicians. Yet after reading its coverage of these controversies, one is left with the nagging suspicion that rock and pop feuds are routinely overreported, exaggerated, or simply opportunities to hand a microphone to someone famous who has something sour to say about a former colleague—or whoever happens to be dominating social media feeds that week. Much ado about nothing at all? Perhaps. Readers love snark. They love gossip. They love tales of aging geniuses turning into grumpy old folks, shaking their canes and walkers at the birds.

Recently, Far Out ran a squib suggesting that two celebrated pop figures, Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell, share a dislike of the songwriter Paul Simon. The notion is an odd one, if only because it invites us to wonder why their shared antipathy should matter in the first place. Does it really matter what Smith or Mitchell thinks of Simon?Smith fancies herself a poet, a journalist, a writer above all else, and there is nothing wrong with that. Her punk-rock inclinations, however, have always struck me as more performative than anything else. Still, I admire her ability to mash together the things she loves into a visceral presentation that delivers the goods. I enjoy her work, and I appreciate the differences between her and Simon. That she doesn't like him? So what?

Mitchell, meanwhile, has spent her later years taking swipes at her peers, among them Dylan, Zappa, John Lennon, Madonna, Taylor Swift, Don Henley, and Grace Slick. The cumulative impression is that her own work represents the high-water mark of popular music, one that others have failed to reach. She is, of course, an extraordinarily gifted artist who has written and recorded songs that will endure until we stop caring about music altogether. But genius ought not to confer immunity from criticism. Mitchell's own output, particularly in its more pretentious or half-baked moments, could withstand a brutal assessment of its own.

Her apparent grievance with Simon seems to stem, at least in part, from his meticulous craftsmanship: the careful wordsmithing, the painstaking construction, the way he makes music and lyrics fit together. Perhaps she mistakes his craftsmanship for some artistic shortcoming, or simply dislikes an approach to songwriting that differs from her own. Whatever the reason, there is something peculiar about dismissing an artist for being so deliberate in his art.Simon, certainly, is not beyond criticism. There are songs and albums of his that I admire less than others, and his body of work deserves the same kind of honest, unsentimental scrutiny we ought to apply to any major artist. But that is a different discussion, one concerned with the merits and shortcomings of the music itself rather than the personal grievances of its creators. My suspicion is that a fair assessment of Simon's work would come out rather favorably.

As for whether Patti Smith or Joni Mitchell likes him? It's an entertaining bit of gossip, perhaps, but hardly a revelation. Artists need not admire one another, and their disagreements do not automatically amount to anything meaningful. Sometimes a feud is just a feud, a passing squall in the pop-cultural weather. The music, after all, is what ought to matter—and it can speak for itself.

LURKING

 

Elmore Leonard told his readers that if they want to write a piece of fiction, never open up the story with a description of the weather. Fine, thought Lurk, I will open up this tale with something that Leonard said about the weather. And then Lurk lit a cigarette stub that had been crushed in an overflowing ashtray on his desk, resting there like a dry, sunbleached turd until he picked it up between the tips of his thumb and index finger, stuck a wooden match against the scratchy mortar of the brick walls that contained his office and put the flaring stick to the curled and crumpled tip of the formerly svelte cigarette. His lungs filled with the kind of smoke that coats the throat with its unique variety of briar patch harshness.

Lurk coughed, he sneezed, he blew snot all over his black turtle neck sweater he planned on parading around the local house in so the babes would think him Lurk the Poetry Man and the dudes would weep into their lattes and glasses of fresh orange juice thick with clubs of algae-like pulp,weeping becomes Poetry conquers nookie with but a whisper and the right sidelong glance. But now the black turtle neck had snot on it, glistening globs of wretched , runny mung.

This won't do, thought Lurk, thinking about the weather . Then he reminded himself that the coffee shop was closed except for take out orders and the Governor said that no could sit anywhere, and that those on essential missions to get supplies needed to go home and stay there when the needed shopping was done for the day. He felt sad. There was nowhere to go but back to sleep.

THE 21st CENTURY HAS NO GREATEST POET. YET

We can make a case for the “best poet” of the 20th century, I suppose, because the century is over and we have the advantage of hindsight. We can survey the poets, the styles, the innovations, the philosophical and spiritual posturing, the aesthetic manifestos, and the assorted claims made on behalf of one writer or another. We can establish some reasonable criteria, provided we don't mistake them for commandments handed down from Mount Parnassus. Even so, we're left with an overwhelming number of writers whose work matters to the literature of the period. So far, so good. Then the trouble starts.The question of who is the best poet, writer, or playwright carries a rather large piece of unexamined baggage: the assumption that the contestants are playing roughly the same game. They aren't. Ethnicity, cultural upbringing, education, gender (yes, gender), race, sexual orientation, and, most importantly, style and technique all enter the picture. We might pretend these are minor variations on a common theme, but that would require a certain determination not to notice what's going on. How, exactly, do we propose to compare writers whose ideas of what poetry is, what it does, and what it might accomplish are fundamentally different?

Poetry, after all, is one of the oldest forms of literary expression. It didn't begin with the English Romantics, the French Symbolists, or some American professor's discovery that the line break could be used to justify a career. The European traditions inherited by Americans from their former colonial masters represent a fraction of the world's poetic inheritance. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of traditions, each with its own styles, cultural origins, politics, cosmologies, theological conceits, and technical possibilities. Languages themselves have expressive properties that cannot always be carried intact from one tongue to another. These are not incidental complications. They are the subject.And the complications keep multiplying. Writers who were once consigned to the margins, where the literary establishment could safely ignore them, have entered the conversation. Their work brings different histories, assumptions, and aesthetic priorities to the table. Suddenly, the question of what constitutes a good poem, much less a great poet, becomes considerably more difficult to settle. Whole libraries could be devoted to the subject, and even then we'd have to leave a few things out. The idea that we can sort this unruly abundance into a neat little hierarchy, award the gold medal, and go home happy is appealing mostly to people who like their literary judgments prepackaged.

Besides, declaring one poet the best of a given period means excluding an enormous number of writers and poetic traditions that are vital, interesting, and important to the expression of experiences that might otherwise remain anonymous. Some of these writers may have little in common with the poets we've been taught to admire. Some may not even agree with our definition of poetry. Tough luck for them, I suppose. The judges have spoken.

Here's a more sensible proposition: admit that you're speaking from a particular position, name your favorite poet, and make your case. Explain why this writer matters to you. Tell us what the poems do, how they work, where they succeed, and why you keep coming back to them. You don't have to pretend to have read everything ever written about poetics, nor do you have to produce a dissertation before you're permitted to express an opinion. You do, however, have to offer something more substantial than a declaration of personal taste followed by a shrug.

Call it “heroic criticism.” The heroism involved is modest but real: the willingness to make a judgment without pretending to possess the final word, to defend a writer without demanding that everyone else fall into line. A critic may have only a passing familiarity with the academic conversation surrounding poetry and still produce an intelligent, nuanced argument, provided the argument is grounded in an attentive encounter with the work itself.The point isn't to abandon judgment. It's to stop confusing judgment with ranking. Tell us who matters to you and why. Make the case. If you can return a poet to the reader's life as something more than a name on a syllabus or a candidate for some imaginary literary championship, you've accomplished something worth doing. And you won't have had to declare anybody the greatest poet of the century to do it.

All my friends are going to be strangers

Eliot's Escape from Emotion

In his 1933 book The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, T.S. Eliot wrote "poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world."  

Eliot was a marvelous, brilliant, subtle poet who saw the 20th century as a place where traditions were shattered to bits by world wars , revolutions and technology and tried to create a poetry that was dually a means of expressing the loss of authorative certainity and a means to piece the world back together where Old Traditions might thrive and better the human condition as a whole. That is pretty vague right there, I admit, but so was Eliot when it came to theorizing about what a poet should actually be trying to do when composing his or her stanzas. But do I agree with what he suggests in the the quote? would agree, yes, generally, but I would also say that good poems, good art can help the mind join a person’s random collection of half processed and ill-remembered experiences and produce a feeling —sensual, spiritual, political, romantic, philosophical—can did exist within the person prior to reading and considering a poet’s (or artist’s) work. 

Much of the time I believe poems, when they are good and evocative , from the pen of a master, can cleave together, the dissociated bits of memories and create a new sensation. It is often said that a poet , novelist, songwriter writes and finishes their individual projects because they want to find out what happens, to discover how it ends.

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